Health reform means economic security for Americans.
President Barack Obama will try to retake the initiative on health care reform this evening with a nationally televised address to Congress. Conventional wisdom holds that it will be among the most important speeches of his political career.
That’s entirely backward.
Whatever the stakes are for him, Mr. Obama’s remarks are of crucial importance for the rest of us — the 250 million Americans with health insurance and the 50 million without it.
We are the ones who have the most to gain from health care reform and the most to lose if special interests succeed in scuttling it.
Ordinary American families have been on a financial treadmill for most of the last decade, running ever faster just to stay in place. Income is stagnating as increases in health care spending consume an ever greater share of wages.
We’re held hostage by fragile health insurance that can be lost if we change jobs — or if premiums rise suddenly and our employer decides to drop our coverage. We’re just one accident or illness away from financial ruin.
The broken health care system lies at the very heart of our economic insecurity. It’s up to Mr. Obama to remind voters of that connection and to sketch out a path to a more solid future.
Too often in recent months, the president’s speeches have resembled graduate-level seminars on health policy. If meaningful reform is to have a chance of passing Congress, tonight’s address must be different.
Mr. Obama should lay out what he wants to accomplish in the simplest possible terms. “We want to cover every American,” he should say. “We want to ensure that money spent on medical care goes to treatments that benefit patients instead of paperwork that enriches middlemen.”
Over the past 40 years, medicine increasingly has become a team sport. But the fee-for-service system we use to pay for it is a relic of an age when medicine was less complex.
It’s time to modernize. Doctors and hospitals must be paid fairly for keeping patients well, not just for providing more care when they get sick.
We need a system that rewards innovation and provides a continuum of care, one that equally values technology and humanity.
There’s an old saying in advertising: “Don’t sell the steak, sell the sizzle.”
Opponents of reform have no steak to sell. Literally, there is no Republican reform alternative. Republican leaders saw no need to address long-standing problems in the health care system while they ran the White House and Congress.
With no policy alternatives to sell, they’re peddling sizzle — in the form of fear. They’ve ginned up opposition to nonexistent “death panels.” They’re spreading confusion about a so-called public option — even though we’ve had a public option called Medicare for more than 40 years.
The people covered by Medicare consistently are more satisfied with their coverage and the quality of their care than people with private health insurance.
Special interests that oppose reform have tried to frame it as a false choice between doing something risky or doing nothing.
But doing nothing is not an option. The status quo is unsustainable. Mr. Obama needs to remind Congress and voters of that reality.
The speech he gives tonight will have an enormous impact on every American for years to come.
Those who oppose reform see this broken health care system as a meal ticket — or a way out of the political wilderness and back into the corridors of power.
But for the rest of us, the stakes are even higher — a chance to get off the health care treadmill that is eating up our wages. For many of the uninsured, the stakes literally are life and death. We can’t afford to let it fail.
I do not accept your premises. Your opinion seems set in stone, and yet you invite discussion, this being the blog zone. Are you actually interested in rational debate?
Was your post deleted, Hugh?
To Hugh,
If you have something rational to say throw it out there. We can debate if we disagree. What makes you think that your opinions aren’t set in concrete?
People opposed to any “reform” at the hands of the gubment know one thing to be true. Nothing gubment touches will be fixed, ever. Past performance is an indication of future results when it comes to governments at all levels. Waste, fraud, abuse, etc will be the norm not the exception. Someone please show me how it won’t be by pointing at just one successful govt program. Please don’t count the collection of taxes as one of them since the gubment has a very efficient mechanism in place already.
We need logical problem solvers who think with their heads, not with their hearts. This issue won’t be solved until more thinkers are present in gubment. Until then we’ll all just sit around here in a they said we said all the while Congress is getting fat dumb and happy at the expense of everyone.
BTW PD, taxes eat up most of my wages, not health care.
Security isn’t all it’s cracked up to be; it’s a death trap. Ask pensioners in Left-leaning countries, or in teachers’ unions in our own country. Why would any want the security of Medicare and Social Security, knowing they’re $trillions in the hole? Is it because they think it’s too big and important to collapse?
I see this healthcare (or insurance, or whatever they’ll rename it tonight), reform as nothing more than another - huge - expansion of collectivism. A proper reform would be to get the hell out of the way, or at least begin to untangle the government from private life.
To AJ,
When you set the bar at perfection no “gubment” program can measure up. And that’s part of the problem. Your side has demonized the government to make people believe that anything the government touches must fail. Obviously that’s plain stupid. MOST government programs work quite well. ALL have faults. The public education system in most of the country works well, except in your case it didn’t teach you to spell government. Yeah there’s problems in a lot of inner cities, and no child left behind is an unfunded mandate that made schools worse, but if you want to know what public schools HAVE done look at countries without them. What are THEIR literacy rates, what are their standards of living? Etc. etc. Look at countries without good water departments-What are their disease rates? Look at countries without an FDA-how many die of food poisoning there? Look at countries without an Agriculture Dept.-What how much food do they produce, is it enough to export? Can they feed their own citizens? The list is endless. You libertarians just don’t like taxes. Well welcome to the club. I’ve watched my taxes being wasted on unnecessary wars, and political witch hunts by republican administrations for MOST of my life and they were ENORMOUSLY more costly in both LIVES and treasure. It’s alright to complain about misuse of your tax money, it’s insane to think we can have ANY kind of civilization without taxes and government. So stop demonizing government it does FAR more good than you or your cronies give it credit for and it handicaps government’s ability to perform at a higher level of efficiency and problem solving. Come back to reality, it misses you.
Your continued claims that the GOP has no viable alternative is specious. Conservatives support reforming healthcare, just not socializing it as you propose. I know you know this and that you continue to say there is no alternative causes your credibility to be called into question. Posting a link to a six week old blog by a left wing newspaper doesn’t prove anything today. Why should the GOP have wasted the trees last summernecessary to provide the paper to print a bill they know wasn’t going to get any consideration by Comrades Pelosi and Reid? Other than the gang of six in the Senate, Republicans have been shut out of the process. Democrat leaders told them, “its our way or the highway,” so those who want reasonable reform took to the highways of America and the people have spoken.The GOP has made numerous overtures for things that would instantly lower costs. The ability to buy insurance across state lines. Eliminating pre-existing conditions. The ability of small comapnies to band together to buy insurance collectively (which was championed by Jim Talent in the 1990’s and was stomped by Democrats at every turn). And, of course, demanding tort reform, which you and Democrats fear like Kryptonite. Conservatives also support incremental reform, testing various stategies before betting 1/6 of the economy on a bill that Obama demanded be passed without debate and before anyone read it.
Again, more lies and lies after lies after lies.
I can expect a post from Mr. Carlton about how stupid we all are for not understanding that Obama knows best and we should sit down and shut up. Sorry, Mr. Carlton, the Jedi mind trick isn’t real and while you think it works every time you try it, we aren’t going to stop giving you facts.
FACT: The “public option” will bankrupt the country. This is indisputable. There is no revenue stream that will sustain or even launch this program. When this goes in you can expect:
* Raising taxes — most likely on the “wealthy” to start. Eventually, the increasing tax burden will reach all the way down the tax brackets.
* Small businesses will be hit hard. Many of the small businesses are part of the “wealthy” that will be taxed to hell.
* Small businesses are the largest employer. When they suffer, we lose most of our jobs. Unemployment will rise.
* With rising unemployment, the “public option” will be exercised more. Go back to the first bullet.
Rich Brown,
You need to learn where the Enter Key is if you want more people to read what you write.
Your post seems to contradict your invitation to Hugh. Let me help out AJ and give you rational points to counter your assertions
* Most government programs are incredibly inefficient. True, in many cases the desired outcome is reached, but with incredible cost.
* Interesting you bring up public schools since in the inner cities, it is the prime example of what liberal progressives have done to the system. In general, public schools can work and they reach their end goal, but they are incredibly inefficient. City schools are an example of how emotion doesn’t solve problems. The tough choices and problem solving aren’t used. Instead, more money is thrown at a black hole — expecting some magic to come out.
* Water treatment isn’t entirely a government function, but this is an example of infrastructure that is more appropriate for a government entity to foster.
* We didn’t have income tax until early last century. Liberal progressives view taxes as crack. They can’t get enough. It has allowed government to grow way beyond its constitutional bounds.
* Looking for a waste of money? Look at Social Security. That budget is way more than the entire defense budget. Defense and military is a core federal government function. Social Security is not and neither is health care.